Nearly two months after her bombshell interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle aired on CBS, Oprah has revealed she was just as shocked by their revelations as the rest of the world.
“I was surprised. I was surprised at the amount of… Literally that thing has become a meme. I’m like, ‘What? You’re going there? You’re going all the way there,'” Oprah said in a recent livestream on The Nancy O’Dell Channel on talkshoplive.
Among the most shocking revelations in the interview were that Meghan had suffered from suicidal thoughts and that someone in the Royal Family had “concerns” about how dark their baby Archie’s skin color would be.
Oprah also revealed that she did not speak with Harry and Meghan in person beforehand, but exchanged text messages with them to make sure they were on the same page. “I didn’t see Meghan and Harry before, but I did text them and say, ‘Intention is very important to me. Tell me what your intention is so that we can be aligned in our goal,'” she said. “Our shared intention was the truth. They wanted to be able to tell their story and tell it in such a way that allowed them to be as truthful as possible.”
Perhaps surprisingly, there were no leaks before the interview aired. And Oprah revealed she talked to the crew to make sure nothing leaked so as not to break Harry and Meghan’s trust. “It was really important to me that what we put out there in the world was put out into the world at the time that everybody could see it and that things didn’t leak and that things weren’t misconstrued before the actual interview happened,” she said.
“I remember when we finished doing the interview, and that interview was 3 hours and 20 minutes I think, and I stood up and said to the crew, ‘We all know what was said here and how important it is to have the trust of the people who just shared that, so I’m hoping you all will not go out into the world and share what has happened here,'” she said. “And nobody did. So as we were releasing clips to CBS, we were releasing them in such a way that whatever was being put out there could not be exploited. So a lot of time and thought and effort and energy went into it on my part.”
But Oprah credited the cultural impact of the interview not to herself, but to Harry and Meghan for being so truthful. “The reason why it was such a powerful interview… What makes it powerful is when you have somebody else who is willing to be as open, as vulnerable, as truthful as they were,” she said. “So I don’t give myself credit for that. I give myself credit for asking the questions. But the reason the interview was what it was because they answered the way they did.”
“I had no idea that it would have the reverberating impact that it has had and continues to have.”